SONJA STEPTOE

Former Journalist, Time, Sports Illustrated, The Wall Street Journal

Sonja Steptoe has received numerous awards for her work as a journalist for Time, People, CNN/SI, HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel and Sports Illustrated. Steptoe was a senior correspondent and deputy news director for Time, based in Los Angeles from 2002 until 2007. While overseeing news coverage in the Western region, she supervised five correspondents and 20 freelance reporters. She interviewed such newsmakers as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Rev. Billy Graham, Gloria Steinem and Whitewater Prosecutor Kenneth Starr. Her essay on the pre-existing racial, political and economic turmoil in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina was part of the package of Time stories honored with two 2006 National Magazine Awards.

She joined Time from People magazine, where she was a senior editor, handling human affairs and investigations. She has also worked as national correspondent for CNN/SI sports network. Her account of basketball point-shaving at Arizona State earned a 1998 National Headliner Award. Her broadcasting experience also includes a stint, from 1995 to 2001, as correspondent on HBO’s RealSports with Bryant Gumbel magazine show, where she investigated East Germany’s systematic doping of Olympic athletes, for which she received an Emmy Award in 1999 from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for Outstanding Sports Journalism.

From 1996 to 1998, she was a Senior Editor at Sports Illustrated, overseeing the editing of a variety of stories and profiles, including a cover story on controversial sports agent Drew Rosenhaus, dubbed by peers as “the most hated man in the NFL.” As a staff writer, Steptoe co-authored the magazine’s 1994 cover story exposing NCAA rules violations by members of the national-champion Florida State University football team. Before SI, she spent five years with The Wall Street Journal, where she covered legal issues—including the A.H. Robins bankruptcy—the pharmaceutical industry and the financial markets.

Listed in Who’s Who in America since 2005, Steptoe co-authored Olympic champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee’s 1998 autobiography, A Kind of Grace. She also authored A Guide to Women’s Golf with LPGA Hall of Famer Carol Mann. After receiving degrees in economics and journalism from University of Missouri, she earned a law degree from Duke University. A native of Lutcher, La., she currently resides in New York.